I spent several years as a front-end contractor. I saw a lot of the same thing on the front-end, especially with JS. Even when I saw stuff like inserting a sing

I spent several years as a front-end contractor. I saw a lot of the same thing on the front-end, especially with JS. Even when I saw stuff like inserting a single black space on a line with JS, or similar things where its just a mess of calls back and forth before something actually gets executed, I asked a senior dev WTF was going on and why did this stuff get written like this. His answer was as simple as it was dumbfounding. He said, "Its contractors. They get paid by the hour. Make sense now?" So basically someone was writing a ton of code just to take up time during the day so they could charge the hours back to the company and prove they were working their 40 hours. They DGAF about the code they were writing, they were more concerned with getting paid. Completely maddening. My senior dev at the time said they won't even spend time refactoring any of it because it would waste too much time. He said they just made sure they have an FTE write the code next time. It was my "welcome to the wonderful world contracting" wakeup call.